Rural Oregon Leads the Way for Large-Scale WiFi

atkulp writes "While cities and incumbent telecommunications operators are fighting it out over municipal WiFi, it looks like rural Oregan is leading the way for large-scale deployments of WiFi and WiMax." The privately funded $5 million dollar wireless network services a modest 700 square miles and seems to be the only show in town.

Comments

Political bribes are accepted practice nowadays?

[RKBA]

"Similar wireless projects have been stymied in major metropolitan areas by telephone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at discouraging such competition."

Doesn't anyone care that our politicians accept bribes (aka; campaign donations) to pass laws that are against the interest public interest (ie; the people the politicians are supposed to represent)?

CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES, Article. II., Section. 4:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Surveillance?

[ChrisGilliard]

"Internet service is only a small part of it. The same wireless system is used for surveillance, for intelligent traffic system, for intelligent transportation, for telemedicine and for distance education," Uhhh, I don't know about this. I don't like the idea of the feds using my internet traffic for "surveillance".

security of WiFi/WiMax (DoS potentials)

[IDkrysez]

From what I've seen, normal Wifi (802.11b and 802.11g) can suffer denial of service fairly easily, even with simply misconfigured clients. I'm not sure if WiMax addresses this, I hope so, but TFA says that the wireless network will cover surveillance presumedly for the chemical depot(s) as well as the shipping yard, and also that various emergency signs can be controlled by WiFi. Assuming they've got these devices and monitoring/control [sub]nets setup securely, it seems that they're still quite vulnerable to a simple denial of service attack. Taking out traffic lights and/or jamming radios is not a new idea to Bad Guys (and Bad Girls), it seems this makes it fairly easy to accomplish criminally-intented DoS with OTS components. I hope there's more to it, possibly a followup article from Wired, which has gotten so damned fufu in recent years.

Yay Oregon!

      -IDkrysez

Re:Political bribes are accepted practice nowadays

[douthat]

I happen to have a copy of Black's Law Dictionary here, so I decided to look it up:

Bribe:
Any money, goods, right in action, property, thing of value, or any promise or undertaking to give any, asked, given, or accepted, with a corrupt intent to induce or influence action, vote, or opinion of person in any public or official capacity.

abbreviated, that would be:
Any money given with intent to influence action of a person in any public or official capacity.

Given the legal definition of a bribe, I'd say that any incident where a politician accepts campaign contributions from a lobbyist and changes stance on any particular issue or votes favorably towards the cause of the lobbyist should be suspect.

Politics and big business

[CharliePete]

A couple of yearss back I started looking into using an alternative ISP for my DSL service. After checking into several that had packages that more closely suited my needs I quickly discovered that the rates that the few providers that offered service in my area were 2 - 3 times higher that what I was already paying for with my telco based ISP. It seems that the FCC regulations that required telcos to open their networks to regional ISPs at discounted rates applied to everyone except Verizon. Economic legislation should only be used to encourage competition not stifle it as we see with any legislation promoted by the Bigs (like the DMCA an the idea of software patents). My hat's off to Mr. Ziari and the people of Hermiston, Oregon for getting this set up on their own.

Re:Political bribes are accepted practice nowadays

[vandan]

The only way to address this is to stip all parties of all funding, and then allocate money for campaigning from tax revenue. Then you make the accounts books of all parties open to public inspection, as well as bank account and tax details of all politicians AND their families. If people want to 'serve' the public, then they can start out by being honest. And you know what the politicians always say about such invasions of our privacy ...

Well, if you're not doing anything wrong, then you don't have anything to worry about

Time they applied this to themselves.

Equal funding of ALL political parties. Equal media access to ALL political parties. People implicated in bribery get charged with treason.